Culinary museum set to reopen

By Patricia Daddona PBN Staff Writer

Closed since last summer for a comprehensive inventory of about half of its collections, the Culinary Arts Museum reopens Tuesday at the Harborside campus of Johnson and Wales University featuring a new teaching lab and exhibit.

Culinary museum set to reopen

THE JOHNSON AND WALES UNIVERSITY Culinary Arts Museum, which was the setting for the 2013 PBN Book of Lists party, is being reopened after having been closed for nearly a year-and-a-half, in part to catalog its extensive collection.

PROVIDENCE – Closed since last summer for a comprehensive inventory of about half of its collections, the Culinary Arts Museum reopens Tuesday at the Harborside campus of Johnson and Wales University featuring a new teaching lab and exhibit.

The new CAM Teaching Lab is available for public observation of research by students. The museum also will function partly as exhibit space for culinary students. When classes are not in session at the museum, visitors can browse the gallery and see examples of student lab work, and the materials students are using to learn.

Also on Tuesday, a new exhibit, “Sweet Success,” will include ice cream, soda fountain, and candy-related artifacts discovered during the inventory project. Two Rhode Island companies are included – Sweenor’s Chocolates and the Salois Dairy of Pawtucket – as well as the Agora Ice Cream Parlor, an 1896 New York landmark.

The inventory, part of the university’s strategic plan, took place during the past year, led by museum staff members, with JWU student assistants and four temporary specialists.

Of the 250,000 items at the museum, about half already had been catalogued, said Kristin Zosa Puleo, event and program coordinator. But now, the remainder of the objects, books and menus has been entered into a collections database, and many have been photographed and researched.

In addition, some 2,000 menus and books have been entered into the museum’s collections database at www.culinary.org. That database, which had only 40 items in it before, will be continually updated.

This online database “is mostly benefitting this campus so far in terms of the curriculum, and as we work with instructors, we’re going to figure out how it can enhance curriculum at the other campuses as well,” Puleo said.

JWU also has campuses in North Miami, Fla., Denver, Colo., and Charlotte, N.C.

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